I’m a white girl. I grew up with all the privilege that entails in the US—privilege it took me years to even start to get my head around. And that’s a task I don’t ever expect to be done with.

Though I’m not quite sure how it happened, given my family’s conservative, anti-feminist politics, I identified as a feminist starting in junior high. It seemed…obvious. I believe women deserve the right to things like suffrage, equal pay, and not being brutalized. Ergo, feminist. It’s something I’ve never felt remotely conflicted about. Which is another marker of white privilege, because…

Feminism, as a movement, has a big long history of race fail. I don’t think it has to be like that forever, but the only way to fix it is for those of us who identify as feminists and also acknowledge this history—and this ongoing problem—to stand up and holler. And frankly, black and asian and hispanic women have been forced to do a disproportionate amount of said hollering.